Installation Art - Softcover

Nicolas De Oliveira; Nicola Oxley; Michael Petry; Michael Archer

3.84

19 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560987049 ISBN 13: 9781560987048

Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994

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Installation is arguably the most original, vigorous, and fertile form of art today. This book sets out to describe the tradition and explore the achievements and ambitions of the installation artist. Michael Archer's illuminating introduction traces the history of installation art from Duchamp's first readymade through the Pop tableaux of Kienholz, Oldenburg, Kaprow, and Dine to more recent developments such as Land Art and Process Art. Installation is a rich art form, often heroic in scale, sometimes witty and subversive, usually impermanent. This pioneering volume captures fully the variety and scale of these many-layered works—the essential contemporary record.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

This ambitious survey of the works of over 200 installation artists lacks a guiding rudder through the sea of pictorial information it presents. British, Northern European, and American artists dominate in creations that range from the strangely ambiguous, as in Wim Delvoye's Untitled (1990), where an oil painting of a bejewelled cat presides over an array of miniature rocking chairs constructed of clothespegs, to the deafeningly obvious, as in Hansjorg Schafer's The Untouchables (1989), meant as a commentary on ``the social hierarchy of contemporary Britain.'' In this work, simple geometrical shapes (such as a pyramid) are formed by champagne glasses, tennis balls, china plates, and clothespegs again. The authors, British artists and art critics, do impose some conceptual order on the dizzying variety of media and intent in installation art, dividing the works into four chapters: ``Site,'' ``Media,'' ``Museum,'' and ``Architecture.'' But the book lacks a convincing analysis of formal themes that reappear in each section, such as the Warholian use of replication. Like Zen masters, many installation artists seem to hope to provide a liberating blow to perception, and many works succeed, albeit somewhat coercively, barraging a viewer with light, color, or noise. German Simon Ungers offers a more restrained effort. In Post and Beam (Umbau 1) (1991), the visitor stepped over tubes of cool white fluorescent light into an all-white gallery whose floor was refitted to duplicate the ceiling. In this calm yet disorienting space, the viewer was made to reformulate something as quotidian as the distinction between up and down. The book's reverse type appears to be making a token gesture towards the same effect. Unfortunately, the thin white letters on glossy black pages strain the eye, and the texts, while supplying a lot of valuable information, hardly provide the sort of incisive new perspectives that many of the artworks themselves at least aspire to. However, the book makes an important and useful reference point and a good start toward understanding an important facet of contemporary art. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

Installation is a quintessentially modern art form. A hybrid of disciplines, from painting and sculpture to performance and architecture, installation attempts to blur the boundary between art and life. This picture-rich international survey covers the history of installation art and provides a host of diverse examples. Such progenitors as Marcel Duchamp and his readymades, Kurt Schwitters and his room-filling constructions, Yves Klein and his performances, and Robert Smithson and his earthworks are identified and discussed in the introductory commentary. The main body of the volume approaches installation in terms of settings. Site-specific works are presented first, then media-related installations, museum pieces, and interior and exterior installations linked to architecture. The artists include Christo, Bill Viola, Jonathan Borofsky, Barbara Kruger, Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelly, and many European artists whose names will be new to readers. No art form can rival installation for sheer variety of material, style, setting, and intent, a profusion well celebrated within these pages. Donna Seaman

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